


Predators and Prey

by TheWhiteLily



Series: Watson's Woes July Writing Prompts 2016 [9]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: BAMF John Watson, Crack Treated Seriously, Gen, Humour, In an unusual Were-Verse, John is an unusual Were-Creature, Well in a way, Were-Creatures
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-20
Updated: 2016-07-20
Packaged: 2018-07-25 15:00:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,337
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7537321
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheWhiteLily/pseuds/TheWhiteLily
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Oh, and you’re a Were, of course,” said the madman.  “That’s enough to be going on with, don’t you think?  The name’s Sherlock Holmes and the address is two two one B Baker Street.  Afternoon.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Predators and Prey

**Author's Note:**

> For the Watson's Woes July 19th Prompt: AU

“Oh, and you’re a Were, of course," said the madman.  "That’s enough to be going on with, don’t you think?  The name’s Sherlock Holmes and the address is two two one B Baker Street.  Afternoon.”

As he disappeared out the door, he winked.

“Yeah,” said Mike, at John's look of confusion.  “He’s always like that.”

***

After a few moments in the taxi together, Sherlock frowned at him.  “I can’t quite place your shift.”

“Mmm,” said John, looking out the window.  “Well, it’s not relevant.  I spend the full moon in a facility up at Baskerville, and I don’t change apart from then.”

“You don’t change at any time other than when you’re forced by your physiology?” demanded Sherlock.  "Hmmm, definitely an embarrassing shift, then.  Not a dog. Fits in some ways, but you wouldn't mind being boring.  No, it's something different.  Unusual..."  He considered it silently for a few moments, and then apparently shook it off.  "Okay, you’ve got questions.”

John glanced at him in return, feeling uncomfortable about asking him immediately after shutting down the topic of his Were-form.

“Go on,” said Sherlock, impatiently.

Well, he _was_ asking.  “Who are you?” asked John.  “What do you do?”

***

“And registered as a Were since July last year, following… hmm, a _very_ interesting incident involving a pack of Were-infected insurgents.  They all died, but not before you took a bite to the shoulder.”  The man with the umbrella turned a page in his notebook, then looked up and raised his eyebrows at John, apparently intrigued.  “Discharged after the next full moon, following your first spontaneous shift into….”

“Don’t,” said John, then clenched his jaw, staring straight ahead.

The man looked at him for the moment, with the familiar faintly smug amusement that lit in the eyes of everyone who found out John’s Were-form.  “Your psychologist thinks your shift is a sign that you were fundamentally unsuited for military service from the start.”

“Who the hell are you?” demanded John, furious.  “How do you know this?”

“Fire her,” said the man, in the kind of tone that implied he spent his life pointing out the obvious to everyone around him.  “She clearly hasn’t done her zoological research.”

***

“Need to get the powder burns out of your fingers,” said Sherlock. “Weres still don’t tend to get the benefit of the doubt in an investigation; you’d likely lose your licence even if you were cleared, have to go back to living at Baskerville full time.”

“Well, let’s avoid that,” said John with a shudder, eyes shifting over the police all around them.

“Yes, let's,” said Sherlock, and grinned at him.  “I need your help to pay the rent, after all.  Are you all right?”

John stared at him, heart warm.  “Yes,” he said, “of course I’m all right.”

***

It was three more days before Sherlock brought it up again.

“A social animal,” he said, out of nowhere on a peaceful morning in the cluttered Baker Street living room.  “Large, regulated pack structure.  Predator, obviously.  Size disproportionate to its prey.”

“I’m not going to tell you, Sherlock,” said John, and turned a page in his book without looking up.

“Oh, please don’t!” agreed Sherlock.  “It’ll be so much more interesting to work it out.”

***

“Three times we tried to kill you and your companion, Mr Holmes. What does it tell you when an assassin cannot shoot straight?”

The gun was pointing right at John.  _Right at him._ The woman who thought he was Sherlock was slowly squeezing the trigger… and Sarah was sitting opposite.  John could see how this was going to go, as soon as he was dead, as soon as she was a witness they had no further use for. 

There was no other option.  John reached down inside, reached down for the place he’d spent long months in rehabilitation learning how _not_ to touch…

He pulled the trigger.

There was a moment of silence as he vanished, his clothes falling in a heap around him.  Shan stared in incomprehension for a moment, and then John flashed back into being in front of her, naked and human and completely _pissed off_. 

He punched her once, hard—he’d learned the hard way in Afghanistan that the rule about not hitting girls only applied when they weren’t holding a fucking _gun_ on you—and grabbed the weapon out of her hand while she going down.

By the time she’d hit the ground, her gun was aimed straight back at her.

“Right.  Okay,” he said.  “Now, you over there: untie Sarah, and I won’t shoot your vaunted general here in the head, and we’ll all, just, just….”

Shan was smiling at him thinly, pushing herself back up to her feet.  John tracked her with the gun, uncertain.

“When an assassin cannot shoot straight,” said Shan calmly, walking closer.  “It tells you—”

John adjusted his aim to her shoulder and pulled the trigger, only to hear an unsatisfying empty _click_.

Shan didn’t even flinch, just kept on coming until the gun was pressed right against her chest.

“—that they’re not really trying.”

She motioned with her eyes, towards where another man was holding a different gun to the temple of the shaking, sobbing Sarah, still tied up and moaning with terror.

“Not blank bullets in _that_ gun,” she said.  “And I do not think, Sherlock Holmes, that your little unregistered-Were trick will allow you to reach her before my companion pulls _his_ trigger.”

There was a long moment of silence, and then….

“Okay,” breathed John, lowering the empty gun in defeat.  He wished very much, now, that he still had his clothes on.

***

“Protective,” said Sherlock, after John was dressed and Sarah had got in a cab, and they were waiting for a cab of their own.  “Altruistic towards members of the pack, vicious in defence, that narrows it down.  And small enough to get out of those clothes without anyone seeing you.  I told you the size was disproportionate with the prey.”

Still suffering the shaky, unstable aftershocks of adrenaline, John looked up at Sherlock and bared his even, human teeth.

Sherlock laughed.

***

They sat in the back of the cab together, on the way to the crime scene.  John’s date was back at the restaurant, most likely cursing the day she’d ever accepted an invitation to dinner from him.

“Dominant animals in the pack control pairing behaviour in the subordinates,” said Sherlock, after a few moments, as though ticking something off on a list. 

“Do _not_ push it,” growled John.  “Or you might just wake up one morning to find yourself a Were-mosquito, you're so bloody annoying.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, John.”  Sherlock raised his eyebrows.  “Clearly, if you ever bit me, I’d be a Were-raven.  Smartest animal alive, when it comes to problem-solving.  And of course the interest in dead bodies doesn’t hurt.”

“More likely a Were-peacock,” said John grumpily.  “Showy bloody idiot.”

***

John woke up alone in a swimming pool change room, the scent of chlorine in his nostrils, and his skin itching and drenched with sweat from the heat.

Groggily, he stumbled to his feet, pushing aside the unfamiliar bulky parka wrapped around him, only to find cold sobriety hitting him like a truck.  

He stared down at the wires and bulges of Semtex zipped onto his chest in numb horror.

“Leave it, Johnny-boy,” said a man’s voice, the soft Irish tones startlingly close in his ear.  Automatically, John’s hand left the vest’s zipper and went to his ear, touching the earpiece, feeling out the shape of it.  “And that.  I can set off the bomb whenever I like, so you’re going to be a good doggie and follow orders, aren’t you?”

John shook his head, moving his hands away, and then felt faintly ill as he noticed that his wrists were encircled by matching silver cuffs.  _Real_ silver.  Two nights previously, the inhibitors couldn’t have held him, but the moon was waning and right now they were more than enough.

“Did you think I’d forget those, Johnny boy?  Every Were can be unpredictable unless caged, even a pathetically tame lapdog like you.” 

John bit his lip against the automatic protest.  He wasn't a dog.  If only he was. 

“It’s nearly show time,” whispered Moriarty, apparently oblivious to his struggle.  “Now don’t say a word out of line to dear Sherlock, or… _boom_.  You saw what happened to the apartment building: if you don't do as I say, there’ll be nothing left of either of you.  Close up your coat until I tell you.  Make him believe you.  Walk through the door, and repeat after me…”

***

Sherlock made their cab stop at a hardware store on the way home.  He appeared again after a few minutes with a pair of boltcutters and set the cab continuing its journey back to Baker Street.

“It’s okay,” said John, as he noticed Sherlock’s hands shaking as he worked the blade into the inhibitor’s lock.  “I could have waited, you know I don't change unless I have to.  And it wouldn't have made any difference in there--the bomb was the same threat on the floor as when I was wearing it.”

Sherlock severed the locks without dignifying John's protest with a word or a glance.  

When he was done, John reached down and touched the switch inside gently--too gently to trigger it, but enough to feel the edges.  He found he _was_ rather glad to be able to change again, after all.

***

It was a break-in gone wrong that did it, in the end.

“Whenever you’re ready,” Sherlock prompted him, as soon as they’d been left alone just feet from the desk full of papers Sherlock had been hoping to look at.  They were tied so tightly back to back in a pair of chairs that John could _feel_ the inevitability of it.

“Can’t you get us out of here?

“ _No_ ,” said Sherlock.  “I can’t, John.  Not even if I dislocate my thumb, which I’m _not going_ to do, because one of us can become a different size and shape on command and instantly get us both free.  Honestly, John.  You did for Sarah.” 

“Shan was holding a gun to my head!” protested John.

Sherlock strained against the ropes again, struggling for a minute, and then he went limp once more.  “I’m sure that can be arranged as soon as our new friends come back.  Probably without all the circus posturing, too.  I think it would be rather better to get in ahead, don’t you?”

John chewed his lip.  “I thought you didn’t want to know.”

Sherlock shook his head from side to side, the motion ruffling the back of John’s hair.

“I didn't want you to tell me, but I worked it out months ago," said Sherlock.  "It was an interesting puzzle, but hardly difficult when I thought it through.  It _suits_ you, John.  Would you prefer if I closed my eyes?” he offered in a tone of voice that implied he’d be doing nothing of the kind.

John sighed.  Sherlock was right.  They _did_ needed to get out of here, and fast.  It was just… humiliating, to be seen like that, and Sherlock wasn't exactly going to blink and miss it.  But it was necessary. 

He reached down for the trigger and changed, surfing the unpleasant feeling of his human mind subsiding into the background, overwhelmed by the simpler brain of his shift. 

It took him a few seconds to work his way free of his trousers, and then he stood up tall on his haunches to scan the area, all of a foot high and his grey-brown fur puffed up with anxiety.  Some instincts were difficult to override unless there was immediate action required.  He froze when his eyes found Sherlock, and trilled an instinctive warning call.

“As I suspected,” was all Sherlock said to the meerkat in front of him, although he was obviously biting his lip in an attempt to hide a smile at the diminutive sight. 

John gave him a tiny growl, and then surged back up into human form, enjoying the way Sherlock’s eyes widened momentarily at the suddenness of the movement.  He grabbed his pants out of the pile of clothing and started putting them on.

“Before you do that,” said Sherlock, having shaken himself completely out of their joined bonds and gesturing wordlessly to the high window above them.  “Would you mind checking?  We may still be able to get the information we need before getting out."

“If anyone sees me, I’m going to lose my licence,” John huffed.  “It’s not like there’s many Were-meerkats on the register.” 

But he changed back and swarmed up the rough stone wall in a single smooth movement to stand in the window.  He chittered the all clear back to Sherlock, who was obviously trying to suppress a smile again as he began looking through the files they’d originally come for. 

“You make an excellent sentinel, John,” he said, with an upward glance.

John was fairly certain the chirruped “fuck you” came across clearly.

***

“Moriarty talked to me,” said John, a day or two later, after they’d got out with the documents and Sherlock was back in the thinking pose he’d taken up weeks ago on arrival back from the pool.  John wasn't sure he'd moved from there apart from the toilet or recconisance since.  He might have starved by now, if John hadn't been feeding him.  “Before I started speaking for him, at the pool.  He thinks I’m a dog.  He called me _tame_.”

Sherlock’s eyes snapped to him, wide with amusement.

“Really,” he said.  “Then he’s not as clever a cobra as he thinks he is.”

“Snakes, scorpions, spiders,” said John, with a feral grin.  He'd finally got over the worry of what he might find, and done a little research himself.  “Rogue cab-drivers.  Just make sure you include me in whatever you’re planning, all right?  Taking down venomous prey is apparently my specialty.”

“Yes it is,” said Sherlock, grinning back.  “And yes, I will.”

**Author's Note:**

> However tiny and adorable they look, meerkats are in fact near relatives of the mongoose family, and will kill and eat snakes, scorpions and spiders. They do not appear to be immune to venom of their prey like mongooses, but that doesn't stop them--they disable venomous predators with fast, skilful attacks. All I can say is watch out, Moriarty. (This footnote has been slightly edited since first posting, as I have updated my zoological research, and found it even more fitting than I'd thought. *grin*)
> 
> I feel like I'm going to have to write a sequel because I did not get the humorous mileage I expected out of John being a Were-meerkat. I can't even say it without giggling, and yet look at this! *gestures uncomprehendingly upward* How did I manage to make a fic about a Were-meerkat so serious?! Were-meerkat! Were-meerkat! *helpless giggles*
> 
> Thanks to Ariane DeVere's most excellent transcripts for the direct quotes from the original.


End file.
